“It may help you get your bearings to know that I am truly the Michael Lanyard to whom Messieurs Secretan & Sypher addressed their advertisement—you remember—as this should prove.”
He offered a slip of paper, and after another moment of dumb staring, the girl took it and read aloud the message which Victor had dictated following Sofia’s flight to him from the Café des Exiles.
“‘To Michael Lanyard, Intelligence Division, the War Office, Whitehall—’”
“That is to say,” Lanyard interpreted, “of the British Secret Service.”
“You!”
He bowed in light irony. “One regrets one is at present unable to offer better social standing. To-morrow, it may be ... But who knows?”
Sofia shook her head impatiently, and in a murmur of deepening amazement resumed her reading of the note:
“‘Your daughter Sofia is now with me.. Your own intelligence must tell you nothing could be more fatal than an attempt to communicate with her’”
To the interrogation eloquent in her eyes Lanyard replied:
“Dictated by Victor to Karslake, who passed it on to me, the night he brought you to the house from the Café des Exiles.”